Goals - Round Three

June 26th, 2012

Hello again! I think this week the goals have changed quite a bit because I’m making good progress on learning coding for all the programs.
• Develop a specific project and write a set of goals for that project.
• UNIX
o I haven’t made any progress with looking at the script that converts sac files to ascii files but I am making progress on UNIX and shell scripting in general.
o Dr. Tkalcic gave me two of his scripts that take some sort of table input and make nice GMT plots. I’m currently working through these and learning a lot from them but I’m still pretty far from being able to fully understand them.
o Every day I learn something new about writing code and I was especially pleased today and yesterday to get some for and while loops working. I am also slowly learning about awk. It’s rewarding to see my codes become more efficient and effective.
• GMT
o I managed to create the code I wanted that converts the SEED file to SAC filez, converts the SAC files to ASCII files, reads the min and max values from that file and then sets those to the window for the plot and plots all the seismograms using psxy. But after doing that I found out there wasn’t much use for a bunch of separate images of raw data.
o So now my goal is to make a map of Australia that shows the location of the seismometers and the earthquake I’m looking at and then create nice figures of the traces. I’m not yet sure what I have to do to the traces before I can make nice figures though.
• CPiS
o In order to use the CPiS program do_mft, which calculates the group velocity dispersion from a user defined fit, I need the vertical, radial and transverse components to be the same length with the same number of data points. I need to prepare and filter the traces before I can actually calculate anything meaningful from them. This is where SAC comes in.
o I also want to learn a new CPiS program sacmat96 because apparently it does the same thing as do_mft but with automated picking instead of user defined so that should be more efficient and equally accurate.
• SAC
o I want to be able to use this program to filter and transform my data so that it can be used in CPiS and GMT.
o I have learned how to change all the headers so that the event time and location are recorded and then change the origin time to the time of the earthquake. Then I can move the origin back to 0 and cut the traces so I’m only looking from the time of the earthquake to 1600 seconds later which is long enough for the surface waves to have died off. Then I can rotate the north and east traces to radial and transverse.
o The next thing to learn is how to choose an appropriate window to cut the data to for each trace to best observe the surface waves. If I can find a way to automate that process then the traces will be ready for use in do_mft or sacmat96.
• Understand what group velocity is used for and be able to communicate knowledgably about it.
o I’m going to start reading papers about group velocity dispersion tomography now which is exciting.
• Be able to produce a poster which describes my project that is up to professional standards for AGU.
o I’m looking forward to seeing all the other interns and also some people working in my group and on my floor at AGU. As of right now I don’t have anything to put on a poster other than the IRIS and ANU RSES logos but I think that soon I’ll be making some figures worth looking at.
o I will need to start thinking about writing an abstract in the not-too-distant future because I think that deadline for AGU is going to sneak up really fast.
• Maintain this blog about what I have accomplished and my goals.
o Seems to be going well, I need to take some more pictures for this week though!
• Explore Australia
o My brother arrives on Saturday and I’m really excited to spend some time in Sydney!

Comments

Another nice list of tasks. How are you feeling about your acomplishments? It looks like you are developing lots great skills and making progress with your project. One possible way to get an intial cut on your AGU abstract would be updating the project description associated with your blog's profile. Starting there might be a good way to think through how you might describe your work to someone in a relatively short chunk.